At the first major policy announcement of his tenure, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s rhetoric echoed that of John Howard: violence against women, he said, needs to be seen as ‘unAustralian’.

But Australianess is a fluid concept that means different things to different people — for example, the republican Turnbull’s conception of it is fundamentally different to the constitutional monarchist Howard’s.

This suggests that one’s sense of what it means to be Australian entails selecting only certain elements of our past. Often, it means taking the good and ignoring the bad.

The American philosopher Richard Rorty believed that the best way to combat human rights violations was to engage people emotionally, rather that rationally. He believed that a global culture of human rights, which in essence is a universally shared sense of humanity, could unite people from different backgrounds.